Some Hell

by Patrick Nathan

  His name—as Colin learned over breakfast—was short for Alyosha, which was somehow short for Alexey. “It’s not like I understand it either,” Allie said as he watched Colin eat a stack of pancakes. For himself he’d only ordered coffee and a fried egg, and every time Colin gestured at the plate in front of him he shook his head. “I’m not gonna go overboard and get fat while I’m at it.” It took Colin a moment to realize that he himself was a vice, a thing Allie knew he shouldn’t have. This he liked and it felt wrong to like it, which he also liked.

  When the waitress came to pour more coffee, Colin leaned over the table. “So am I your youngest boyfriend?” His heels were off the floor and knocking together. The salt and pepper shakers, the glass bottles of ketchup and mustard and Tabasco, the mug full of extra forks and knives—all of it was rattling. Allie ignored him and looked up at the waitress.

  “We’ll need the check, thanks.”

  After she’d gone, Allie leaned away from him. He looked out the window as he spoke. “We’re gonna have to set down some rules. If this is going to work anyway.” At that time, Colin had no idea what this was—only that it was the closest thing to what he’d most wanted for what seemed like his entire life. While they waited for the check, Colin did everything he could to caress Allie’s hands, find his foot under the table, run his fingers on the soft spots of his wrists. “Definitely we can’t touch each other,” Allie said. How were you supposed to have sex, Colin wondered, without touching?

  That first day, they spent most of their time going to coffee shops, daytime bars, and stores along Hollywood or Sunset. Allie bought Colin new clothes. “These should actually fit,” he said, going two sizes smaller than what Colin had always told his mother to buy. For the rest of the day he noticed people looking at him. At first he felt self-conscious but after an hour he realized that, whenever he met someone’s gaze, it was the other person who looked away. That morning, after his mother left and before Allie came to take him to the beach, he’d watched himself in the mirror. For years he’d thought his skin was permanently white, as though he was shrink-wrapped in a film that sloughed off all color, unless he burned. Since they arrived in LA he’d been outside every day on unshaded streets. He’d been to the beach twice and he hoped, now, that people wouldn’t look at him like something washed up from the ocean’s forgotten, lightless depths. His hair had paled to a younger color. All that was left of the pimples on his chin and forehead were the little white scars from too much scratching. When they arrived at the beach, he insisted they sit near the retaining wall, not only because of all the garbage but because, from there, you could see all the people who might turn to look at you. He’d never felt so important.

  “You’re a vain little fucker, you know that?”

  “I’m gonna do everything I can to get my mom to move here,” he said. For two days now he’d cultivated his alternate life—that school against the hillside. Now that he’d fleshed it out and peopled it with friends, he could believe in it. “But even if she won’t, I think I’m gonna stay.” Sweat was trickling into the well between his ribs.

  Next to him, he could feel Allie thinking. “It is a nice city.”

  Colin shrugged and sat up, his towel unpeeling itself from his back. He bent his knees up against his chest and hugged them, scanning the beach for anyone who might smile at him. “Can we get Chinese?” he asked. He didn’t want Allie’s dumb lecture about what was best for him, how he should stay with his family and all that. What family? he wanted to say. It was starting to seem like a failing business, a lost cause, everyone jumping ship while they could: his father, his sister, his brother even though it wasn’t his fault. Colin didn’t want to be the only one left.

  “Chinese Chinese or California Chinese?”

  “Chinese. Just feed me. And a place without dog or cat or whatever on the menu.”

  “They don’t actually eat dog.”

  “I read about it online.” He rolled over and looked up at the retaining wall. The watermark was right at eye level, beneath which the ocean had left a few treasures: tiny seashells, knots of seaweed like cooked spinach, cigarette butts, and a new sheen that, as the sun moved west, splintered into rainbows. It was hard to call things like the ocean beautiful when it harbored this garbage and scum, this oily life. “And a shower,” he said. “Maybe we could stop by the motel?”

  Allie flicked sand off his towel with a tiny key-shaped bolt of driftwood. “I was planning to take you back there anyway. There’s some stuff I need to do later on. But don’t let me forget we have to make a detour, up to Encino.” He reached into his pocket and glanced at his phone. “In fact we gotta leave now.” He sat up and wrenched the towel off the ground. Colin saw something black vanish into the dimpled sand and he wondered what was underneath them, all along this beach—what was crawling and tunneling. He gathered his things, checked his shoes and clothes for spiders. “I should keep you around,” Allie was saying. “Without you I’d have forgot all about Stanley. You should be my secretary or something. And not like that,” he added, before Colin’s eyes even had a chance to light up.

  If you watched TV or loved movies, LA felt like a place you’d already been. More than anything you recognized street signs, and on the drive to Stanley’s, Colin saw Olympic, Wilshire, Sunset, Mulholland, Ventura. The actors from whom he’d learned those names were giving directions in his head. His mother, driving through Hollywood, had made fun of people lining up to buy “maps to the stars.” But once in a while he caught himself staring out the window or standing on his motel balcony trying to spot someone, just so he’d have a story when he went home. If we go home.

  In Allie’s sedan he tried to belong. He leaned back in the seat and put his bare feet on the dash. Even his toes had lost their normal pallor.

  If she wouldn’t let him stay, he’d leave her at the motel. It wouldn’t take much—a new haircut and color, different clothes—and with his darker skin she wouldn’t find him. That she’d sit at their kitchen table back home, months after giving up on her search, smoking her cigarettes with Shannon, with coffee—that she’d sit wondering what happened, how he’d done this—made Colin’s head light and his heart stand out against everything else inside him. He was always a good boy, she’d tell Shannon. Never in a million years did I think he’d go and do this. He was always too scared, too shy. I never thought he had the guts. Allie’s car was winding through a canyon, its hills and slopes parched from no rain, and Colin let out a long whoop through the open window as though he was already on his own. Allie frowned and said something the freeway’s roar swallowed up.

  Stanley’s house wasn’t a mansion but it tried to be one, its lawn laid out like someone’s idea of a palace, the columns on the front steps wrapped in grapevines. When Allie pulled into the driveway he turned to Colin. “Stanley’s my guy,” he said. “Just so you know.” He killed the ignition and got out of the car. Colin felt like someone had taken a scoop out of him, and he wasn’t sure, when Allie walked him through the stained glass doors, whether or not he’d start bawling. You mean nothing to me, he imagined Allie saying as he and this Stanley caressed each other, loved each other.

  But Stanley didn’t act like the other men Allie had introduced him to. He wore slacks and a suit coat with a pink T-shirt underneath. There was a glass of ice in his hand he couldn’t seem to set down. And he was old—too old to be someone’s boyfriend. Colin sat on the couch and tried to look bored but the room was too beautiful, like a movie star’s or a football player’s. All along one wall were pictures of the same woman, over and over. Then he realized that guy just meant drug dealer. “My wife’s a doll,” he said when he caught Colin looking at the pictures. “Even you can appreciate that,” he added, and winked when Colin scowled at him.

  The plan had been to leave right away and get Chinese in the Valley but Allie wouldn’t get up from the couch. He sat with his arms behind his head and watched Stanley pinch and crumble leaves into the glass pipe they’d decided to sha
re. Colin shook his head when Stanley held it out for him. In an alternate universe, a not-pregnant Heather might be somewhere in Chicago, Milwaukee, Denver—anywhere—doing this exact thing. Outside, the shadows were longer. Stanley’s pool, reaching through the hedges, was a white sheet of light. “Where’s your bathroom?” Colin said. They were giggling about something, the noises coming out of them nothing but clicks and whimpers. He sighed and made off down the hallway.

  The bathroom was lined with pictures of naked women, but not like women in magazines. Instead they looked out over cityscapes and lay reading on blankets in meadows. Once, he’d tried to read Penthouse as though it was medicine or therapy. “Get hard,” he whispered, but it only lay against his thigh like a reptile that’d just fed. When nothing worked he decided he was too nervous, too worked up, and relaxed with a story about a kidnapped boy he’d printed from one of his favorite websites. The story he knew well and didn’t even have to finish. He only had to read up to the part where the man, who’d been so kind, betrayed the boy’s trust. Right then he looked at the centerfold and imagined it was her who made him come. These days, he no longer tried to pretend that girls or women could do it for him. Soon, he thought, he wouldn’t have to.

  Colin didn’t want to go back to the living room. There was more hallway to his left. Every room was designed for a single thing—one full of records with a chair in the middle, one with a pool table, one with nothing but bookshelves and couches. He paused outside the gym, a treadmill and a weight bench back-to-back, mirrors on every wall. He could see a million copies of himself standing in the doorway. Then there were a million copies of someone else, just behind him. Stanley must have had a son or a nephew, someone who could’ve been Stanley himself thirty years ago. “You get tired of looking at yourself eventually,” he told Colin. His voice, slow on the vowels and squishy on the consonants, gave everything away. Colin smiled and leaned back against the door frame.

  “I was just looking for the bathroom.”

  “Bathroom’s down there.”

  “I know. I mean I used it already. I was just—heading back.”

  “You have an accent. Where is that? It’s like…I know where you’re from…”

  Colin swallowed and tried to iron it out of his voice. “Minnesota.”

  “That’s adorable. Say ‘rowboat’ for me.”

  He shook his head. His skin, he could feel, was as red as it could get.

  “Come on.” He put his hand on Colin’s shoulder. “It sounds so cute. Just say it for me. Say rowboat.” He leaned in so Colin could say it quietly, in his ear. Colin said it and felt fermented laughter on his neck. “Say ‘trash bag.’” For his age—early twenties, he guessed, no older than Allie—his voice was deep and carried into the person he spoke to.

  “Trash bag,” Colin said, and the man leaned closer as he laughed.

  He took Colin by the shoulders. “God, you’re cute,” he said. “How old are you? Don’t answer that. I maybe drank too much.” He put his thumb against Colin’s lips. Every part of his body that could shake was shaking, every part that could sweat was sweating, every part that could fill with blood as full as it could get. His lips made a sound as they let this strange person’s thumb into his mouth, as he flicked his tongue to show what little skill he had. “Stan will be busy for a while,” he said, and hoisted Colin over his shoulder like he was nothing but a bag of leaves. “Don’t say anything,” he said. It was more of a plea than a threat but Colin pretended it was life or death, and while it was happening he told himself there was nothing he could do, no way to escape, no choice but to lie there and suffer and wish all suffering was this. The man’s bedroom was dark and half-underground, the windows little more than slits of light near the ceiling. Colin’s clothes seemed to unpeel themselves from his body, these strange hands masterful and light upon his skin. It felt like the man was inside his head as well as his body, doing everything Colin didn’t know that he wanted. Whenever Colin reached for his own cock the man batted his hand away. “That’s mine,” he whispered in his ear, and with only the occasional stroke kept him on the verge of coming for what felt like hours as Colin begged. He’d heard it was supposed to hurt but it wasn’t pain he felt at all, this man moving within him. There were parts of himself he hadn’t known existed, and for the first time his climax bloomed from the inside out. His eyes filled with tears as he looked down and saw himself in spasms, not a hand anywhere near it as it jumped and pulsed like a creature electrocuted, spilling his load all over them both. The man, too, was finishing, his groans leaping up an octave as he squealed fuck fuck fuck in Colin’s ear. Never had he felt so cherished, so worshipped as the man pulled out and licked Colin’s mess from his stomach and chest, from his thighs. “You’re absolutely perfect,” he said, more slurred than before, and Colin buried his face in the wealth of pillows just underneath him.

  When they left, an hour later, Allie’s eyes were bloodshot and his words all stretched out. But he wasn’t stupid. “You don’t have to hide it,” he said when they pulled onto the freeway.

  “Hide what?”

  “Your grin. The red spots on your neck.” Allie reached for the radio and found the overplayed dance music they both knew by heart. “I have more than one guy,” he said. “I have more than one guy in the Valley, even. There’s a reason I went to Stanley’s.” He turned up the volume and began to sing under his breath. Colin knew he wasn’t supposed to speak. Instead he looked out the window where the afternoon had ripened into evening. The shops along Ventura had mirrors for windows. The sun filled the sky behind the car. As they sat in traffic Colin began to fidget, tapping his hands on his thighs, bending back knuckles he’d cracked only minutes before. There was no way his mother wasn’t back at the motel, waiting for him. Would she, too, be able to sense it? Would she know what he was and what he’d done?

  “You okay?” Allie asked when they rolled up to the next light.

  “I’m totally awesome.”

  “I know we’re late,” Allie said. “Try to relax, though. Think of everything we’ve done today. Everything you’ve done. It’s a big day for you.” He smiled and reached over, letting his hand fall on Colin’s neck. Colin closed his eyes as his skin broke out in shivers. Then Allie stopped and withdrew, coughing into his fist before he returned both hands to the wheel. “It’s just a few blocks more,” he said, as though the car ride was intolerable and Colin was just a dumb impatient kid.

  How to tell him it was okay to drive forever? They could head down to San Diego, into Mexico. Colin imagined himself smuggled under blankets, folded up into the trunk. They’d cross the border and find a hacienda somewhere south. From there he’d send postcards. To his mother: Happy, please don’t worry anymore. To his grandfather: Reading lots of books on the beach. To Andy: Glad you’re not here and Life without you is sweet. He pictured Andy reading it. To him, Colin might be something like a hero, someone he’d wish he had held on to, and this imagined sadness—Andy’s fake remorse—reached in through Colin’s ribs and strangled his heart. Sex with Stanley’s son or nephew—he hadn’t even learned his name—wasn’t what he expected. He did it and he liked it and he knew he’d like it again, but it hadn’t changed him. As they crept through traffic he faced the window, afraid of crying. He wished his love for Andy had been fucked out of him. Because he still wanted him. He wanted Allie, in the seat next to him, to be the short, bony, obnoxious boy who used to sneak liquor from the cupboard above the fridge, who won a wrestling match by grabbing your balls or jabbing you in the ribs. He wanted them to have stolen this car, two fourteen-year-olds only halfway sure how to drive it. It should be Andy staring down at him as he writhed in pleasure, caressing Colin’s cheek and calling him perfect. What he wanted was for them to outrun the cops, to evade the FBI, to send little hints home to show their parents they were okay, they were happy, they were in love. What he wanted was to be happy. And he wasn’t, he realized. Even now he wasn’t happy. He couldn’t be.

  By the ti
me they parked behind the restaurant he was crying and Allie put his arm around him. Over and over he asked what was wrong. Colin slid closer and buried his face in the weed and coconut smell of Allie’s chest. If they were ever going to have sex this was the opportunity, and for a second Colin considered it—reaching for Allie’s fly, pulling out his cock. He imagined himself sliding right on, his hands on Allie’s shoulders as he rode him right there in the street. But there was no point. He’d done what he came here to do and it wasn’t enough.

  Colin used chopsticks to nudge his pot stickers back and forth, chewing while he tried to think of some way to fix his life. Outside, the sunlight had backed itself against the eastern edge of the Valley. In what was left of the day’s heat it had the look of a mirage—a bowl of black water you’d pursue only to find more stucco and palms, more waste.

  “You’re a moody little fucker, aren’t you?” Allie asked.

  Colin shook his head.

  “I feel like something’s my fault.”

  “Shut up.” Colin pushed his plate away and rested his chin on his hands. But the food looked too good and he kept eating. He could feel Allie watching him like you’d watch a stray, starving dog, capable of anything. As Colin shoveled more rice into his mouth he gave him the finger.

  “That’s not very ladylike. You won’t be the belle of the balls with an attitude like that.”

  “Dude, shut the fuck up. I’m not—ugh, you’re being stupid.”